I don't know if anyone noticed, but in the sample file given, there was a space between the last word and the bracketed br in the first line, and no space in the second. I don't know if it was a typo, or if it was an intentional fine point. In any event, it screwed up the spilt on space to array, giving 1 extra element.

There may be a clever regex to do this, but here is a simple way a beginner can understand.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

open (my $fh, "< test.txt") or die "$!\n";  #input file
open (my $oh, "> $0-out.txt") or die "$!\n"; #output file

my $script = '/home/whoever/bin/myscript.pl';

while (<$fh>){

my $string = $_;

# strip off trailing <br> and anything after it
$string =~ s/<br>.*$//;

#strip whitespace at end in case space preceded the <br>
$string =~  s/\s+$//;

## split on space
my @words = split / /, $string;

#print join "\n",@words,"\n";

my $lastword = $words[-1];

print $oh "$script $lastword\n";

}
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